A great deal of noise is being made about Twitter’s latest attempts to rescue itself from stagnant user growth, with the board last year recalling the co-founder it fired in 2008, Jack Dorsey, to lead the turnaround. But are the board and investors
Browsing: Twitter
This week brought yet more disappointing results for Twitter. The past six months have been turbulent for the social media platform. In its latest round of quarterly results, it reported a net
It is five years since the potential of social media was considered limitless. Not only was social media revolutionary, but it was literally capable of bringing about revolutions such as the uprisings of the “Arab Spring”. There was no part of our social lives that
When my digital media students are sitting, waiting for class to start and staring at their phones, they are not checking Facebook. They’re not checking Instagram, or Pinterest or even Twitter. No, they’re catching up on the news of the day by checking out their friends’ stories
Let’s start at a common point of departure: the mere notion of mobile operators hoping that so-called “over-the-top” services be regulated is insanity. One can understand how an operator and its executives can think this rational, though. After all, an operator only knows how
As you might have seen, the networks are at it again, on a drive to get the government to regulate Web services, which these network operators like to call “over-the-top” providers. Regulating Internet services will have a huge ripple effect throughout
Western governments, notably the UK and the US, are pushing the software industry to open “backdoors” into our encrypted communications. The argument touted by government agencies for nearly 20 years is that terrorists use strong encryption to hide their communications, therefore we should ban strong
There are as yet unconfirmed reports that Twitter plans to extend its 140-character limit to 10 000. But why would Twitter consider radically changing its most unique characteristic? Today’s media culture is one of extreme speed and ephemerality – facts and factoids, comment, claims
In a day in which the penny dropped on racism in South Africa with the Penny Sparrow “monkey” scandal gripping the country, Standard Bank dropped another bomb, announcing the
South Africa’s new finance minister has distanced himself from a Twitter account that has amassed several followers. One account in the name of Douglas van Rooyen, @daviddvanrooyen, had over 2 600 followers as of Friday morning and follows just two accounts, one of them being